@RolandiXor I also just loaded the additional comments. I'm still going to say your overall point is not really wrong (if too pessimistic) but the later thing about being a joke is way too far, I think.

@RolandiXor Well, I respect your opinion but I disagree with that point. I do my best to stay up with linux in general and what's going on in other distros and regularly also use Debian, Fedora (and Korora), and OpenSuse. Things sometimes get tricky with Ubuntu questions since Canonical is a commercial company.

ubuntu/canonical decided we need to write unity, and mir, and do snaps, and phones. They divided all their resources into 5 different places and now we have a bunch of half written stuff lying around while the desktop stagnates.

And the thing is, none of the decisions ubuntu/canonical have made were wrong, they were just wrong all together. I mean, unity is great. Snaps are great. Ubuntu touch is great. Mir is.. at least ok. But all together? You've got 4 half written buggy apps now. Do you agree @RolandiXor? Alone, one at a time, they would probably have been fine.

@Seth I agree with your comment and the larger point you just made as well. but I'd argue there's no stopping the move to cloud/mobile and the question is how to bring the desktop along. I think the problem is both more difficult and more expensive than MS, Canonical, and Apple have thought it would be so far. But the half-started then semi-abandoned projects (from MS as well) is absolutely a huge problem.

@chaskes you're not wrong, there was no stopping it, but the way canonical dived right into both at once, while also trying to tackle mir, snaps, unity 8, etc, put ubuntu into a nose dive that anyone could have predicted.

@Seth Right now, I need to re-learn hardcore Java for work and don't have much time for other things; but even apart from that, the Canonical Churn long ago caused me to stop wanting to hack Unity, learn Scopes, learn Snap or anything Ubuntu specific. I'll wait for all of that to settle down.

@Seth Excellent point...yet they still seem to start and abandon tech projects regularly. In fact the extra cash might exacerbate the problem with them: just when you think, "It's been 18 months, this is sticking around" and start digging in...they end up killing it too.

I have a standard Ubuntu 16.04 laptop (recent install), which just won't play videos at all.
If I went on youtube, the video would load, and I can jump from various places in the timeline and see the frames, but the video just won't play. No errors in the console.
I then look for examples of html5 <